In the hydrocarbon exploration and recovery art, communication and control become more important and prevalent each and every day. More and more sensory, monitoring and control equipment is placed in wellbores and likely will continue to enhance production capability. While it is possible to create complete strings that include all of the communication monitoring and control conduits already in place, there is increasing interest in wet connect capabilities to speed and simplify equipment changes for maintenance, replacement or simply to employ different configurations over time in the well to optimize production. While wet connect systems are relatively common in the art, there are often trade-offs among cost, functionality, reliability, etc.
Commonly, wet connects are hydraulic or electric in nature, where a pressure competent connection or an electrically isolated connection, respectively, must be created. These require a reasonably high degree of cleanliness and there are several methods currently utilized to make these connections with varying success rates.
More recently, optic fibers have become more and more the conduit of preference. As optic fibers require greater positional registration and even more cleanliness, the art is always receptive to improvement in systems designed to wet-connect such fibers.